Game Jam: What Would Molydeux?

Share this:

@PeterMolydeux operates a twitter feed of brilliant ideas, inspired by the thoughts and imaginings of an unspecified developer, which has been a source of intrigue and belly laughs since its inception. Just looking at today’s feed I see these startling visions: “Just imagine a kart game where you spend most of the game building one with your mother in a shed, you are the only people alive on earth” and “you play a baby in a pram and can only see your parent’s faces. Studying those faces deeply is the key to true progress”. This being the year of the Game Jam, a global 48 hour extravaganza will take place this weekend, exploring the visionary’s finest brain-eggs. Livestreams, chat and more await here.

46 Comments

<PeterMolyneux> The new Dungeon Keeper will let you actually see the unique facial features and behavioural traits of every one of your minions, including the imps, each of which will have full, strong AI driving them with a complete pyramid of needs dictating their actions from simply needing to stuff their face with chickens in the hatchery to achieving their wildest life-long dreams and ambitions. Your imps will let you carve your dark domain infinitely in any direction through a realistically modelled set of geological strata, encountering and conquering other keepers before breaking the surface and taking on the entire armies of good, upstanding man. Also you will be able to marry as many Dark Mistresses as you want.

(2012, and still a comment system that silently eats angle brackets. Sigh.)

Because someone still thinks it’s a good idea to mangle XHTML in a half-arsed and inconsistent fashion with regexps, of course. If I type “I <3 Deus Ex", IIRC it will automagically escape that to &lt;.

In fact, editing this post again, it’s even turned one of the quotes into &quot; on a whim. Not that editing and saving a post again is a no-op on this shoddy system…

Clarification before the flood: this is NOT the real Peter Molyneux. It’s a Fake. This does not mean that the real Molyneux won’t copy some ideas wholesale though. Nor that it’s a bad twitter. It’s downright brilliant!

I’m just now finishing getting my tools in order. My team will be at the Oakland location. We’ve picked the tweet: “You play a babysitter. You turn up, and the baby is made of cardboard. Would you stay? I want games to start asking more ethical questions.”

Last night I was at the opening night of the London Molyjam. Peter Molyneux was there. He gave a speech (an epic speech), and went round to talked to the people and gave them design advice. He is a lovely man. I didn’t specifically ask him what he thought of the parody account, but he’s definitely in favour of the jam. And of hiring people from the jam…

That’s why Molydeux has been so popular – half the ideas are ridiculous parodies of Molyneux’s high-concept brainstorming, but the other half are genuinely great but completely improbable-sounding ideas that people would love to see made into real games.